Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/22/driver-fined-387-after-traffic-cameras-shoot-her-holding-phone-or-a-sunglasses-case.html
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I guess we can look forward to even more automated systems issuing summary judgements against us, with no chance of appealing to an actual human being, as if society was taken over by Facebook customer support. If you want a picture of the future, imagine an “AI” camera, misidentifying things as phones, forever…
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Why are you holding wallets, cigarette cases, or other objects while driving? All of these things indicate distraction, maybe less so than a phone but still.
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I’ve briefly held a sunglasses case prior to putting on sunglasses. And yet somehow, I managed to not have an accident!
I don’t imagine that (if you drive) you either have never at any point driven momentarily with one hand.
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How about the steering wheel, am I allowed to hold it while driving?
(I’ve temporarily misplaced my manual.)
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From the comfort of my armchair, the width of the sunglass case looks narrower than the photo. But my armchair doesn’t know all the context like whether this was taken at night and what her actual phone looks like. $387 can encourage someone to claim they had their thumb on any number of things. I can confidently say as a human, given a minute, I can find someone on their phone while driving that can be fined in her place. Not sure what the solution is here but there are definitely a lot of people getting away with it.
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I know plenty of people, including myself, who almost constantly drive with only one hand. It’s something you start to do once you get comfortable with operating a vehicle. There isn’t a law against it either.
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Ah, but idle hands, devil etc., don’tcha know!
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Yes! The seamless harmonization of safekeeping authority and revenue, pervasive surveillance of all personal activity, the assumption if you don’t need to be doing it you’re not allowed to be doing it.
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Yes, for now. But once AI starts flagging traffic cam images, then no. The laws will applied capriciously and most of us will receive fines that are too difficult and expensive to fight. Will anyone fix the AI to not be utter garbage? No, because the metrics look too good. Numbers will be way up on “catching” infractions, and everyone will pat themselves on the back for making the community safer while also bringing in more revenue. A few gigawatt-hours of power will be wasted on AI datacenters every year just to send us incorrect fines that we can’t fight.
Define socialism.
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So… Late stage capitalism is the problem.
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They never do, do they…
I thought you were blaming socialism?
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Socialism? You mean like barn raising, militias and the commonweal?
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But the manual shows you the correct way of holding the steering wheel so as not to alert the AI!
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Oh, for the good old 1800s when everyone was reasonably happy and free! Except of course for all the people who weren’t but don’t count for, you know, reasons. 
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OH NOEZ ANYTHING YOU DON’T NEED TO DO IS FORBIDDEN!
Or, it turns out that “I was just reading a text” is on a par with “but I only had a couple of drinks!” in reports of car accidents, only where someone who had a few too many is just as likely to kill themselves in any number of ways of losing control of their car, someone distracted by their phone is more likely to blow through a pedestrian crossing or a red light.
The cameras everywhere monitoring sucks, but it’s orders of magnitude worse in, say, London.
So, yeah, the problem here is the prove-your-innocence-oops-it’s-impossible-to bullshit (of which there is far too much, but lets not pretend that the creep of strict liability isn’t a problem pretty much everywhere). But sure, die on the hill of “I demand the right to fiddle with my phone while in operation of a large metal box moving at speed”.
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But those socialists won’t let you read it while you’re driving.
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